Love Saves the Day (2 page)

You might think Sarah and I are a family because we live together, but not everybody who lives together is a family. Sometimes they’re roommates. The difference is that, in a family, everybody does things together, and they do those things at the same time every day. They all eat breakfast with each other, and breakfast is always at the same time in the morning. Then they have dinner together, and that always happens at the same time, too. They take each other to school or work and then pick each other up from those places a few hours later, and both the picking-up and the dropping-off happen on a schedule. I learned all about it from the TV shows Sarah and I watch together. Even the TV shows about families always come on at the same time, every day.

(I used to think that the things on TV were
really
happening, right here in our apartment. Once I tried to catch a mouse that was on the TV screen. I clawed and clawed at the glass and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t get the mouse. And Sarah laughed and explained that TV is like a window, except it shows you things that are happening far away.)

With roommates, it’s more like you have separate lives even though you live in the same place. Things happen when they happen and not at any specific time. Also, families live in houses with an upstairs and a downstairs. Roommates live in apartments. Sarah and I live in an apartment, and our schedule is always different. Sarah says this is because they always change the times she’s supposed to work. She types things for a big office in a place called Midtown, and she’s so good at typing that sometimes they need her to type early in the morning, and sometimes they need her to type
later in the day. Sometimes they pay her a lot of extra money to type all night and not come home until after the sun comes up, which is when most other humans are first
starting
to work.

Money is what Sarah uses to get food for me and to keep our apartment. She always says you have to get it when you can get it, even if you wish you didn’t have to. I know just what she means, because sometimes a cat has to chase her food when it runs by, even if she’s in the middle of a really great nap. Who knows when the next time food runs by will be? That’s why smart cats spend most of their time napping—to save their energy for when they suddenly need it.

But even on the days she doesn’t work, Sarah doesn’t do things on anything like a regular schedule. Sometimes I have to meow in my saddest voice and paw at her leg to remind her it’s time to feed me. I feel bad when I have to do that, because I can tell from her face how unhappy it makes her when she forgets to do things for me. But she usually laughs a little in the way that humans do when they’re trying to make something sad into something funny, and says she supposes the reason she’s so forgetful is because she has an artistic temperament, even though it’s been years since she’s done anything creative.

I’m not sure what a “temperament” is. Maybe it’s something an artist makes. Or maybe it’s something an artist uses to make something else. Whatever it is, though, I’ve never seen anything like that around here.

You might think from all this that I’m complaining about living with Sarah, but that’s not true. Living with Sarah is actually pretty great. For one thing, she’s always willing to share her food with me. When she sits down to eat, she usually puts some of her food on a little plate off to the side, and I sit on the table and eat with her. Although sometimes Sarah eats things that are just plain gross. There’s one kind of food, called “cookies,” that Sarah especially loves even though they don’t have any meat or grass or anything in them. Sarah laughs when I turn up my nose in disgust and
says I don’t know what I’m missing. I think Sarah’s the one who doesn’t know what’s supposed to be eaten and what isn’t.

There are two rooms in our apartment. In the room with our kitchen is also our couch and television and coffee table. This is the room people are allowed into when they come to visit us, although people hardly ever come to visit us except for Laura and, sometimes, Sarah’s best friend, Anise. Anise only comes over two or three times a year because her job is going on tours in a place called Asia. Laura won’t come over if she knows Anise will be here, but Sarah and I are always happy to see Anise because when Anise smiles she smiles with her whole face, and she never says anything even a little untrue. Also, as Sarah likes to say, Anise is a person who understands cats. (As much as a human can, anyway.) When I first came to live with Sarah, she brought home a “self-cleaning” litterbox that would make a terrifying
whirrrrrrr
noise whenever I tried to use it. (I think it planned to keep itself clean by never letting me use it.) It scared me so much that I started going on the living room rug just to avoid it, which made Sarah very unhappy with me even though it
clearly
wasn’t my fault. This went on for weeks until finally Anise came over and wrinkled her nose at the smell from the rug that now filled our whole apartment.
Ugh
, she said,
doesn’t Prudence have a litterbox?
Then she saw the “self-cleaning” monster Sarah had brought home and said,
Sarah, you’re scaring the piss out of her with that thing
. (Although really the piss was getting scared
into
me until I couldn’t hold it anymore.) She took Sarah right out to buy me a regular litterbox, and we didn’t have any problems after that.

The other room in our apartment has our bed and a dresser for Sarah’s clothes and—my favorite place—our closet. There’s all kinds of fun stuff for me to play with in both rooms, like old magazines that feel like the dry leaves I used to lie on sometimes when I lived outside, and framed posters on the walls that I can jump up and hit with my paw until they go in a different direction. There are shoe boxes of little paper toys that Sarah calls matchbooks, and Sarah says she has a matchbook from every club and bar and restaurant she’s been to in New York since she moved here thirty-four
years ago. Even though Sarah has a lot of stuff, she’s careful to keep everything neat and put-away so there’s plenty of room for me to run around. It’s the one thing Sarah’s good at being organized about.

Way in the back of our closet are a lot of clothes she never wears anymore—she wore them a long time ago, she says, back in her “going-out” days. Some of her clothes have feathers on them, so of course I thought they were birds and tried to catch them with my claws. That was the only time Sarah ever got really mad at me. But if a human doesn’t want her clothes chased by a cat, then she shouldn’t have clothes that look like birds.

It took me a while, but I’ve finally gotten the whole apartment to the point where it has a comfortable cat-smell. It’s not anything a human would be able to smell, but if some other cat were to come here and try to move in with us, she would know that another cat already got here first. The back of the closet especially has a very homey and safe aroma. Sarah put some old things of hers there for me to sleep on, and it’s the closest thing I have to my own private cave.

And, best of all, our apartment is filled with music. Most of it lives on round, flat, black disks that Sarah keeps in stiff cardboard holders. All the cardboard holders have pictures or drawings on them, and some of them look exactly like the posters hanging on our walls. The wall where the music lives, though, doesn’t have any posters hanging on it. That’s because that whole wall is nothing but music, from floor to ceiling. Sarah tells me I’m not allowed to mark any of it with my claws, which means it belongs just to her and not to both of us. Still, I get to listen to it with her. The black disks don’t look like they should be able to do anything, but Sarah puts them on a special silver table that can hold two black disks at one time. Then she presses some buttons and moves some things around, and the disks sing their music. Sometimes we only listen to one or two songs, but there are times when Sarah makes the black disks sing all day. Sometimes, although not very often, Sarah sings with them. That’s always my favorite.

It’s because of music that I adopted Sarah in the first place.
This was when I was very little and had been living outside with my littermates. We were running away from some rats one day, which are the most disgusting creatures in the whole world. They have horrible long teeth and claws, and they smell bad, and if they’re not chasing you to hurt you then they’re trying to steal whatever bits of food you’ve managed to find. Then it started to rain—a huge, terrifying thunderstorm that I was sure would drown every living thing that couldn’t find a hiding place. My littermates and I, between running from the rats and then trying to hide from the rain, got separated. I ended up tucking myself under a broken cement block in a big empty lot. I was scared to be alone for the first time in my life, and I started mewing in the hope my littermates would hear me and come find me.

Instead, Sarah found me. Of course, I didn’t know she was Sarah then. I just knew she was a human—taller than most of them, with brown hair to her shoulders. She looked older than a lot of the humans who live in Lower East Side, but not
really
old.

Usually, I’m very good at staying hidden from humans when I don’t want them to find me. Most people would walk right past my hiding places without ever seeing me. I don’t think Sarah would have seen me, either, except that she stopped in front of the lot and stared at it for a long time. She stared so long that the clouds went away and the sun came out, and that’s when she spotted my hiding place.

I thought she was just going to walk away and leave me alone. Instead she came closer and squatted down to hold out her hand to me. But I’d never been touched by a human before and didn’t trust any of them. Plus, I couldn’t understand what she was saying because I didn’t understand much of human language back then. I backed up until I fell into a puddle, shivering at how cold the rainwater made my fur.

And that’s when Sarah started singing. It was the first time I’d ever heard music—almost everything I’d heard until then were ugly and scary sounds, like machines, and things shattering on the sidewalk, or humans yelling at my littermates and me when they chased us away.

Sarah’s music was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. I’d
seen
beautiful things before, like the plates of perfect food that people ate at outside tables in warm weather. Or the shady grass under trees in the park that humans go to, which meant my littermates and I could do nothing but hide from the humans and look with longing at how pretty the sunlight was and how cool the shade looked.

But when Sarah sang, it was the first time something was beautiful just for me. Sarah’s music was
my
beautiful thing, and nobody was going to chase me away from it or try to take it from me.

I couldn’t understand the words she was singing, but there were two words her song kept saying:
Dear Prudence
. She sang
Dear Prudence
right to me like it was my name. And it turns out Prudence
was
my name. I just didn’t know it yet.

But Sarah knew it all along. That’s how I knew I could trust her, even though she was a human. I decided then and there to adopt her, because it was clear we were supposed to be together.

Mice hardly ever find their way into our apartment, but whenever one does I catch it and present it to Sarah, to show her that I’m willing to do things for her in exchange for her doing things for me. And I practice very hard at catching mice even when there aren’t any around. I train on empty toilet paper rolls or crumpled-up balls of paper, leaping on them and rehearsing my fighting techniques so that when a mouse does come in, I’m ready. If I work hard, I hope that Sarah and I can be a real family one day, instead of just roommates.

It’s as I’m thinking this that I see, from my perch on the windowsill, Laura across the street. She’s getting out of a car with a man I don’t recognize. Laura and the man are carrying a bunch of big empty boxes.

And I couldn’t tell you how I know it. Maybe it’s because Laura so rarely comes over even when Sarah
is
here. I get a tight feeling in my belly that spreads up to my back and makes my fur stand up higher than it usually does. My whiskers pull back flat against my
cheeks, and the dark centers of my eyes must be bigger because everything suddenly looks too-bright and startling in its clarity.

Even before Laura gets to the front door of our building, every part of my body knows already that something terrible has happened.

L
AURA AND THE STRANGE MAN BRING THE SMELL OF OUTSIDE IN WITH
them. They also smell like each other. Not
exactly
like each other, because male humans smell different from female humans, but enough so I can tell they live together.

If Laura had come in by herself, I would greet her at the door with a loud demand for explanations. Although humans aren’t as good at understanding cat language as I am at understanding human language, a firm and direct
meow
usually prompts a response. For example, if Sarah hasn’t remembered to give me a cat treat, I’ll stand next to the kitchen counter and meow pointedly. This always makes Sarah either give me a treat or explain why she hasn’t by saying something like,
Oh no! We’re out of treats! Let me run across the street and buy you some more
. Sarah says this means I have her “trained.” Training is what humans have to do to dogs, because a dog doesn’t even know when to sit or lie down unless
a human tells it to first. (The humans who keep dogs must be
very
patient and kind to burden themselves with such simple-minded creatures.) That’s not how I think of Sarah at all. It’s not that I
train
her, it’s just that sometimes I have to
gently remind
her.

But Laura is here with a man I don’t know, so I decide to wait under the couch until I’m sure coming out will be completely safe. Humans can be unpredictable. Sometimes they lunge at me and rub my fur the wrong way, or even (this is so demeaning)
pick me up off the ground
! So all I can do is watch and wait while Laura props the front door open with her foot to allow the man to enter in front of her, then kicks it shut behind her and turns the three locks.